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Key High Availability (HA) Considerations When Transitioning from VMware to Nutanix

By Margaret Hoagland, VP, Global Sales and Marketing, SIOS Technology 

As organizations evaluate infrastructure changes to optimize their IT operations, many are considering the transition from VMware to Nutanix. This shift can bring significant benefits, such as better performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency. However, before making the move, it's crucial to assess your high availability (HA) needs to ensure your mission-critical applications remain secure and operational.

Here are ten critical points to consider when selecting an HA solution for a Nutanix environment.

1. Identify the most critical applications

Start by identifying which applications in your current VMware environment require high availability. Applications with 99.99% or greater uptime needs, such as SQL Server or SAP, are essential to business operations and cannot afford downtime. The productivity loss and customer impact from even brief outages can be costly. By determining which applications demand enhanced availability, you can tailor your HA strategy for Nutanix.

2. Consistency Across Operating Systems

Does your environment include multiple operating systems, such as Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux, Rocky Linux and Windows? If so, ensure that your HA clustering solution supports a wide range of Linux distributions as well as Windows and provides a consistent user experience across them. This can streamline management, reduce complexity, and help prevent issues as you move to Nutanix.

3. Change Management for Migration

Consider whether you want to replicate your VMware setup in Nutanix exactly as is or if you're open to improving and streamlining your processes during migration. A careful review of change management needs will help avoid disruptions and ensure a smooth transition.

4. Nutanix Ready Validation

Select HA clustering software that has been Nutanix Ready Validated. This ensures full compatibility with Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and guarantees that support will be available if issues arise. Having a validated solution can mitigate risk during and after the migration.

5. Testing Your New Environment

Testing is essential for a successful migration. Start by migrating non-critical workloads to Nutanix in a small-scale environment. This allows your IT team to familiarize themselves with Nutanix's interface and fine-tune HA settings. Comprehensive testing helps you catch and resolve potential issues before moving your mission-critical applications.

6. Training and Documentation

The move to Nutanix will likely introduce new interfaces, tools, and procedures for managing your HA environment. Invest in thorough training for your staff and create detailed runbooks documenting the setup and management of application servers, including network details and disaster recovery (DR) responsibilities. Well-prepared teams reduce the risk of human error and enhance operational efficiency.

7. Performance Requirements

Define the performance demands of your applications. The HA solution you choose must be able to meet these performance needs consistently. Regular performance monitoring and adjustments are essential to ensure optimal application performance, particularly for workloads with high transaction rates or processing demands.

8. Application Awareness in Nutanix AHV

Nutanix's hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), when combined with an application-aware high availability and disaster recovery software, provides a resilient cluster setup. More advanced HA solutions for Nutanix AHV environments provide plug-ins customized for specific applications and databases, such as Oracle, SQL Server, SAP, HANA, and Postges SQL These plug-ins ensure that the application/DB-specific requirements are adhered to so that recovery from failures is fast, reliable and in alignment with application vendor best practices.

9. Failover Configuration

Consider configuring your clusters for failover at the application layer. This approach gives you greater flexibility for migration and disaster recovery. Application-level failover ensures minimal downtime while giving you more control over how your systems recover and continue to operate in case of failure.

10. Zero Downtime for Ongoing Maintenance

Simplified ongoing maintenance is key to long-term operational success. For example, with some advanced clustered environments, you can upgrade the passive node while the active node keeps running. Once the upgrade is complete, failover to the updated node can be done seamlessly, minimizing disruption and ensuring continuous availability.

By keeping these considerations in mind as you plan your transition from VMware to Nutanix, you can ensure that your high availability requirements are met. Each of these steps contributes to a more resilient, flexible, and efficient IT environment, helping you get the most out of your investment in Nutanix.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margaret Hoagland, VP, Global Sales and Marketing, SIOS Technology

Margaret Hoagland

Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales and Marketing, is responsible for leading SIOS Technology Corp.'s sales strategy and manages the execution of the full range of corporate, product, and marketing communications programs, that support the adoption and utilization of SIOS solutions. Margaret brings to her role more than 30 years of marketing experience including 15 years of experience in the high availability space. She has a strong track record of partnering with cross-functional teams to build unity and alignment across the organization. Margaret earned a Master's of Science in Communications Management from Simmons College and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College.

Published Wednesday, October 09, 2024 7:29 AM by David Marshall
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